Privacy

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Privacy has become one of the defining issue of the Information Age. CIS has received national recognition for its interdisciplinary and multi-angle examination of privacy, particularly as it relates to emerging technology.

Albert Gidari is the Director of Privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. He was a partner for over 20 years at Perkins Coie LLP, achieving a top-ranking in privacy law by Chambers. He negotiated the first-ever "privacy by design" consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission on behalf of Google, which required the establishment of a comprehensive privacy program including third party compliance audits. Mr.

Jennifer Stisa Granick is the Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. She is the author of a forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press entitled American Spies: Modern Surveillance, Why You Should Care, and What To Do About It. From 2001 to 2007, Granick was Executive Director of CIS and taught Cyberlaw, Computer Crime Law, Internet intermediary liability, and Internet law and policy. From 2007 to 2010 she served as the Civil Liberties Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Norberto Andrade is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow scholar at UC Berkeley School of Law, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (BCLT), and a Fellow at the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (HiiL, The Netherlands). He has worked as a Scientific Officer at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, and as a legal expert in the field of telecommunications at the Portuguese Regulatory Authority for Communications (ANACOM).

Charles Belle is the founder and Executive Director of Startup Policy Lab, a new nonprofit think tank dedicated to connecting policymakers and the startup community. Examining public policy at the nexus of startups and technology, Charles' research is currently focused on privacy and how to support local government open data initiatives while simultaneously protecting citizen privacy.

Earlier this year, I wrote that the wiretap numbers reported by the Administrative Office (AO) of the US Courts in its 2014 Wiretap Report and those disclosed in transparency reports by the major telecommunications companies just didn’t add up. While the AO reported 3554 wiretaps in 2014, the four major U.S. carriers reported 10,712 wiretaps implemented for the same period -- a threefold discrepancy.

Senator Chris Coons, Democrat from Delaware, offered a bill today that would delay implementation of proposed changes to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41 for six months. Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society and Mozilla have been studying issues related to government hacking including the Rule 41 changes.

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On Friday, the President’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity published its final report, making 16 recommendations and identifying 53 action items to improve cybersecurity in the United States.

Though it has been evident for years that Mark Zuckerberg really, really wants Facebook to operate in China, I’m genuinely surprised that the company appears, finally, to have made the decision to do it.

More than two years after Ferguson became a hashtag, spawned a movement, and drew national attention to problems about police accountability, the most tangible reform has been the spread of police body cameras. Their use seemed like a clear solution to problems of trust and oversight, but the reality hasn’t been that simple. Body cameras have introduced new problems of their own. How can we do better when the next new police technology arrives? Here are five things to keep in mind.

Palo Alto lawmakers have proposed legislation granting the community greater control over police surveillance — including the Police Department’s purchase and use of equipment such as drones, license plate readers and social media monitoring software. Palo Alto and 10 other cities around the country that have proposed similar laws are part of a movement to bring the community and elected representatives into decisions by local police to acquire such powerful and invasive surveillance technologies. We all should urge our own elected representatives to take similar steps.

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Arguing that a defendant’s conviction for website hacking should be overturned because legitimate, highly valuable security and privacy research commonly employs techniques that are essentially identical to what the defendant did and that such independent research is of great value to academics, government regulators and the public even when – often especially when — conducted without a website owner’s permission.

Arguing that the information publicly available on the NSA's Upstream program, combined with an understanding of how the Internet works, means plaintiff Wikimedia has met its burden of proving standing to challenge Upstream.

Arguing that if the court should not compel Apple to create software to enable unlocking and search of the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, it will jeopardize digital and personal security more generally.

"“Attribution may be based on more than just [a] digital trail in a specific case. It may also be based on a series of exchanges between a series of humans, and even the broader diplomatic relationship.”"

""One of the main selling points for body-worn cameras is their promise to bring transparency and accountability to police community interactions," says Harlan Yu, a founder of Upturn, a Washington, D.C.-based firm that provides analysis to policymakers, and the author of a recent national "scorecard" on body-worn camera policies. But the cameras, he says, "don't automatically provide accountability."

""It could have been beyond the scope, but I’m sure the investors are going to be asking if it was beyond the scope, then why was it," says Scott Shackelford, an associate professor of business law and ethics at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business who’s written about cybersecurity due diligence."

""Discovering that Geofeedia was not only being used by social media sites to help police spy on activists of color was disturbing enough," said Malkia Cyril, executive director of the Center for Media Justice. "But then to find out this third-party vendor is also helping to police public school students is beyond disturbing, it's a terrifying bypass of the most basic rights of some of the most vulnerable, and most dissident, voices in the country: activists of colour and students.""

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Join Mozilla and Stanford CIS for the second installment in a series of conversations about government hacking. Information from our first event, discussing the upcoming changes to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41, are available at that event’s page here.

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Stanford Cryptography Policy Project, we are holding an afternoon event highlighting our research and accomplishments over the past year. As our keynote speakers, it is our pleasure to welcome the Honorable Stephen W. Smith, Magistrate Judge of the Southern District of Texas, and Paul S. Grewal, former Magistrate Judge of the Northern District of California.

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"While Google has used differential privacy to analyze user data from its Chrome browser, Apple is the first major tech company to adopt it more widely and publicly, said Arvind Narayanan, a computer scientist at Princeton University.

“That’s what makes this so exciting – both for the technology and for the future of privacy protection,” he explained.

In terms of challenges, Narayanan said the technology could come with extra costs.

The age of global transparency is upon us. Whether you’re using mobile wiretaps, drones, or satellites, surveillance has become cheap and ubiquitous. And governments aren’t the only ones doing it. These days, almost anyone can peek into the lives of the world’s rich and powerful—and expose sensitive information, using new-fangled technologies or old-fashioned methods like leaks to the press.

In this episode of Foreign Affairs Unedited, we’re taking a closer look at what the end of secrecy really means for governments, politicians, and everyday people.